February 28, 2005

Interview With The Coach, “It is an evaluation time.”

Notes from Killer’s usual post-w/e interview on the TEAM 1200/Dean Brown and Gord Wilson. After thanking Killer for coming on the radio he quipped, “Yeah, it’s fun.” Apparently he told people that he didn’t plan on talking to anybody ’til Tuesday. He said, “It was a bad w/e.”

[paraphrasing]

Some of the fellows who you hope are going to be the leaders and get it done weren’t doing the job, and neither was anyone else.

It was the way we lost. I said to them if a team goes out one night and works hard you can live with it as a coach. If you go out and work and lose then you can look in the mirror.

We had too many players who didn’t do their job.

Sometimes I get the feeling that they think it’s [effort] one of those things that they can turn off and on.

It gets down to the point that if they want to work hard enough then fine. We have some talent. But if you look up and down our line up and the best player is Jamie McGinn and he’s all of 16, you’re in trouble.

What’s next? Well, I’ll try to come down, and get back to business. Try to convince them that they’re not playing for first place, but to get into the play-offs.

I couldn’t put the guys on ice because there’s no ice available [due to shows being held at the Civic Centre]. (Yikes.)

We still have our own fate in our hands, but I don’t see anything desperate in their play that shows that they’re looking at first place. You’d hope that they are looking at their standings and know where they are. Sometimes you wonder if they realize the importance of every game left and whether they care.

We made mistake after mistake and I’m not going to say it was one person, but there was a combination of two or three in one goal. And in another, a situation of us just standing around watching them score a pretty goal.

Goal-tending held us in. We were badly outplayed and they were all over us in Mississauga and we couldn’t get the puck out and Battochio held us in. Guadagnolo in Erie did the same. No problem with goal-tending. We made too many mistakes and had too many people blaming each other.

(On getting Mancari back from suspension) He had a big w/e before he got suspended. But it’s one of those situations, you know the rules. You don’t do something that could cost the team. And that did cost the team. It was needless and we lost four games. Maybe everyone will realize that you have your own job to do.

(Is it too late to start juggling line combinations) We did it over the w/e and we gave some of the fellows some pretty big time outs on the bench, but it turns out we would have only had one line playing on the ice [if we sat everyone who deserved it].

(You’re an emotional guy. You wear it on your sleeve. Is this a time where you probably talk less than more) It is an evaluation time. Will they work, will they dig in the corners, will they come in with an effort, and not only for this year. We have some players coming back next year. If they can’t do the job now then they better forget about next year, because I’m looking. If it means that we have to change the philosophy for next year then we will. If they don’t show they want to play now, do we want them around next year?